Month: March 2005

Confusion has prevented Henderson from collecting any money in civil penalties for code violations since the City Council authorized such fines last May. Now two council members say they will have to revisit the ordinance to clarify the intent and streamline the process.

Beryle Lewis, a social worker for the foster care office at the Vance County Department of Social Services, donates a pint of blood at the Henderson Operations & Service Center on Wednesday afternoon. She tries to give every two months but said this donation was her first in four months. Rick Norwood didn’t get quite the turnout he hoped for Wednesday, but Vance County’s Red Cross director got something special during the blood drive at the Henderson Operations & Service …

With one speed hump painted yellow, a three-man city crew paints the second on Granite Street on Thursday. The humps ensure that a green light at Garnett Street won’t entice drivers to race down the road. There’s no getting around the need to go slow on Granite Street now.

Vance County’s department heads have until the third week of April to complete their budget request documents, and County Manager Jerry Ayscue said it’s clear from the outset that this will be another tough budget year.

The old National Guard armory on Dabney Drive is not an ideal building for use by the school system, but the dual purpose of saving the structure and meeting a need for schoolchildren is enticing, Superintendent Norm Shearin said in an interview last week.

An 8 percent sales tax is not a concept that thrills us, and we were caught off-guard when we heard of Board of Education Chairman Tommy Riddle’s idea to use that tax to finance the school system’s serious facility needs.

Code Compliance Director Corey Williams is in his first year as a Henderson department head and is in the middle of his first budget season for a department that didn’t exist a year ago. He got a pointer from a veteran of the process during the Clean Up Henderson Committee meeting two weeks ago. “We just got through budgets,” Williams said with some relief while delivering the regular report on his department’s activities. Chief Glen Allen, in his eighth year …

It says a lot about the sorry state of college basketball officiating that two of the biggest calls in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament — at least in the eyes of local fans — are deservedly controversial.

Clean Up Henderson Committee Chairwoman Lynn Harper shows how the abandoned houses, indicated by red dots, crowd around schools and the tourist route to Kerr Lake. Sen. Richard Burr has received some 390 appropriations requests, and from an office in Washington, one looks pretty much like another: Some town somewhere in North Carolina has a problem and wants the federal government to throw some money at it. Senatorial aide Drew Elliot said that’s pretty much how he saw Henderson’s request …